A need exists to access and use various types of capabilities provided by remote computing systems over the Web. In addition to user-initiated interactions, software programs on remote computing systems may also interact for various purposes and in various ways. For example, there is growing use of the Web to provide so-called “Web services,” which typically involve the programmatic interaction of remote applications to exchange information via defined APIs (“application program interfaces”). Web services allow heterogeneous applications and computers to interact, and may be defined and implemented using a variety of underlying protocols and techniques.
While capabilities provided by services over networks to remote users and other clients have various benefits, as the numbers of clients and services increase, it can be difficult for the services to manage access to and location of the computing-related resources.